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How many noisy quantum copies do you need to distill purity?

Thilo Scharnhorst, Jack Spilecki, John Wright

May 26, 2026

Given n copies of a noisy quantum state, how many do you need before you can reliably reconstruct its purest component? Previous answers only worked asymptotically—as n grows to infinity. This paper gives a concrete, finite formula: the required copies scale with the desired output quality and the gap between the two largest eigenvalues, but not at all with the dimension of the state. The proof rests on combinatorics of random Young diagrams, a classical tool finding unexpected use in quantum resource theory.
Published as Nonasymptotic bounds for quantum purity amplification arXiv:2605.27262
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